Laura Kasischke: What Doesn’t Kill You (July 2003)

No writer really knows where the “source of power” necessary to write a story or a novel comes from, Laura Kasischke notes, yet we all need it and fear losing it.  Kasischke looks at the sometimes superstitious lengths to which writers have gone to try to invite this power, focusing on the lives and work of Balzac and Stephen Crane, while also showing the creative tension between the world of their experience and that of their imagination.